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jakebeImagination Exercise
GABRIEL
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box/Pyramid Song - Radiohead
Gabriel lied in his hospital room, drugged out of his mind on painkillers. It had been two weeks since he entered the hospital, and his mind hadn't been clear since. Of course, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing...especially when you had 12-foot wings ripping themselves out of your back in the most painful way possible.
The hospital room was in the constant state of decaying off-white that most things that strove for perfection were. Everywhere he looked (when he could see through the haze of morphine), he saw dingy yellow walls, fading ceilings, cold fluorescent lights flickering distantly overhead. The floors were also cold and dingy, constantly infected with small bits of dirt and dust that had been tracked in from the occassional nurse visit. Not quite the monument to sterile pefection that they had wanted.
The pain in his back throbbed softly with the beat of an electronica drum; Gabriel focused on it whenever he wanted to stop floating in his medicated bubble. He thought about it, his mind reaching out to it like an anchor. He could feel his wings stretching a bit, the muscles having grown enough that he could actually manipulate them. The bones seemed to be fully grown and healing over, and wide webs of leathery skin had develepoed between the wing joints. They had grown a healthy sort of stubble, the kind you get after going for three days without a shave. Pretty soon, they might be growing feathers...but Gabriel didn't know that. All he knew was the dull pain that arced over his back, slowed by the power of modern medicine. And that his bed sheets were dingy.
He retreated back into his haze of white fog, slowly, gradually. The hospital room faded, and so did his bed. The walls, the nurses, the droning doctors telling their patients it would all be OK...all faded, blended together into a simple, pure white.
Gabriel hung there in that expanse. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, or walls...just white space all around him, wrapping his pain-drenched body in a tranquil, open blanket. It was quiet. For a moment, Gabriel almost knew peace; a moment of contentment washed over him like a much needed shower...and then he blinked.
Something red had landed on his torso.
A single drop of some dark red liquid had fallen from somewhere above him. Before he had time to ponder this new development, another one landed somewhere on his chest. This was followed by another, then another. Confused, Gabriel looked up...
There she was, suspended above him, her arms cut up her elbows. They were covered in blood, which dripped down from her slowly spinning frame onto Gabriel. More blood fell from her outstretched fingers, her lifeless eyes staring into him with a decidedly accusatory fixation. Before he could do anything, Gabriel watched her as she floated away, slowly growing smaller, more indistinct...until she was nothing but a red star in a shining white sky. That star multiplied and split into dozens of stars, then hundreds....all of which became the spots on his tiled ceiling.
Gabriel felt a prick on his arm. He looked over quickly, and noticed the nurse giving him another injection. He felt his body relaxing involuntarily before he had time to protest.
He sighed. SilverClaw had not come for days; the last time any friends visited him he was too out of it to really notice. Gabriel silently cursed the wonders of modern medicine as he drifted back into his half-life.
ALEX
Uluru - Tim Wheater
The room was perfect for meditation.
It was cool, and it was calm, and a certain tranquil kind of energy had descended on this place like morning dew. The window to his far left was open, the silky green curtains blowing gently in a soft breeze. It was a welcome respite from the chaos of his life over the past few months.
It was the middle of November, and already this had shaped up to be the worst, weirdest semester of his life. Laura Palmer murdered, then resurrected only to be murdered again...quite a few impostors popping up and attacking randomly...Jack Rutherford 'clones' popping up all over town before descending onto the police station and blowing themselves all to kingdom come...Jack's subsequent conviction of the Palmer murder and disappearance...all culminating in his expulsion from the university. Someone up there hated him. A lot.
Alex was just beginning to form a picture of the events from the past few months. He knew this; that there were more than just people on this planet, that they had all sorts of weird powers, and that his Ethics professor was a satyr. He just shook his head and sighed. Life was a lot simpler when he was just a student.
The room was polished and decadent, complete with cherry wood furniture and green upholstery. The carpet was soft and thick, almost like meadow-grass if you walked on it in bare feet. The bed was equally plush, and so was the high-backed reading chair, and the pillows. It was quite amazing that Dr. Abros was able to afford all of this on a University of Arkansas budget; it never quite occured to him that he might have supplemental income.
The wind blew with a comforting melody from the window, filling the room with a strangely supernatural aura of peace and tranquility. Alex closed his eyes, letting his mind slip away just a bit, into that comforting void of mindlessness...when suddenly, there was a rapping on his window sill.
Alex got up, just a bit grumpily at the interruption. Walking over to the window he spied a large raven perched on the sill. It had a note in its beak, which it let float to the floor at Alex's feet. Picking it up, he wondered what kind of oddness this little note would be the gateway to.
"Watch your back," the note said.
Alex simply shrugged and stuck the note in his pocket. He had gotten used to receiving strangley ominous notes in a variety of strange circumstances. Only time would tell if it would prove correct.
GAME 12: Dreams of Future Past
This was a sort of 'reset game', I guess. My role-playing style was a bit too hard and controlling, and this is the game that I wanted to start turning that around. I got my inspiration from the recent Marvel 'reset' of the X-Men. It picks up where the old series left off, but it takes it into a new, more streamlined direction. It doesn't try to change history; it just selectively disremembers certain things to slough off all the crap that doesn't matter. That's what I aim to do.
I started the game with what I call an 'imagination exercise,' a bit of a meditative exercise designed mainly to help my players get into character. I set music for ambience while I drag the players down into a meditative state, and then take them on a sort of journey through the mind of the character. It was a wild success, actually; I think I'll be incorporating at least semi-regularly in the campaign.
Now, onto the doings.
Gabriel was left drugged in the hospital, while Alex was offered a semi-permanent home by his former Ethics professor, Dr. Benjamin Abros. Alex was just settling into his room when he got the note from the raven, who literally dumped it at his feet and took off. Alex pretty much took it in stride and went exploring into the general library...where he found a quite surprising book.
It was a quite old and tattered book with no jacket. When he opened it and read the title page, his jaw dropped..."The Three Musketeers, First Edition". Underneath was written "To my good friend Eldrin - Alexander Dumas". Before he had much time to ponder the implications of this, though, Kristen decided to show up, looking for Benjamin. They were planning to perform a ritual at Wilson Park, but he hadn't shown up just yet. She elected Alex to come with her instead.
Meanwhile, Dr. Abros had gone to the hospital to 'visit' Gabriel in the hospital, and ended up breaking him out of there. It took quite a few Arts to get him out, but they managed to do it in the end. Gabriel's wings, however, are quite a problem now; they're fully grown, and just beginning to come into feathers. They haven't quite gotten the motor control they need to be hidden effectively, though, so it's quite obvious he has them.
After a minor incursion with the guards there, Dr. Abros and Gabriel managed to make it out of the hospital relatively unscathed. They hooked up with Kristen and Alex shortly there-after, and started off towards the park...this was when Gabriel decided to go back to his apartment.
This is kind of test, I'm sure, of Storyteller flexibility. In that instant, I could see all of my carefully laid plans flying out of the window. Well, the best surprises are the ones you don't know about, so I went along.
Gabriel's roommate Jack wasn't home, but he did manage to learn quite a few things about the outside world that he had missed during his time away. The bike that got totalled during his little run-in with SilverClaw was probably gone forever; once news of Gabriel's 'condition' made the papers and national news, his bike company wrote him a short letter that stated simply "We don't service freaks". Jack's written several notes about how he can never have any sardines when he wants them, and Gabriel found out that chimerical penguins had taken over his bedroom. The best news, however, might have been that Gabriel's 'godmother', Beverly Higgenbotham, was traveling down from his hometown of Wicked to oversee his Fosterage.
As Gabriel was preparing to leave, he heard a knock on the door. Since he's the innocent and trusting sort (and thus easy to screw over...who says a Storyteller can't be sadistic?), he opened up right into the arms of two police officers. He tried to hide his identity at first, but, well...it's not too easy with giant naked wings arcing out from your back.
The policemen were, to say the very least, well-armed. Gabriel was on the verge of being caught when Alex got a very strong premonition that something wasn't right, egged on by Kristen's worries. Benjamin, Alex and Kristen all arrived to engage in a bloody skirmish with cops who were armed with silenced Magnums and tasered night-sticks. After five minutes of the scrappiest fighting ever, the players finally gain the upper hand, and Gabriel ends up shooting one of the officers with his own gun. Benjamin and Kristen quickly calm him down and try to undo the damage. They managed partial healing (Benjamin with Primal Art, and Kristen with Life Magic), but couldn't get answers or finish the job before Fayetteville's finest arrived on the scene.
In quite a hurry, they took the remaining indisposed officer and fled the scene.
CRITIQUE
This was one of the most entertaining games I've ran in a long time. It didn't progress much of the story, but it was compact, scrappy and there was a lot of tension, which is something that's missing from a lot of my games. The players roled their characters extremely well, and I was quite impressed with the thought and instinct that they displayed. They were quite empathetic with their characters; if we can carry the momentum of this game and run with it, pick up one or two more players along the way, then this Chronicle might get up off the ground after all. :)
GABRIEL
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box/Pyramid Song - Radiohead
Gabriel lied in his hospital room, drugged out of his mind on painkillers. It had been two weeks since he entered the hospital, and his mind hadn't been clear since. Of course, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing...especially when you had 12-foot wings ripping themselves out of your back in the most painful way possible.
The hospital room was in the constant state of decaying off-white that most things that strove for perfection were. Everywhere he looked (when he could see through the haze of morphine), he saw dingy yellow walls, fading ceilings, cold fluorescent lights flickering distantly overhead. The floors were also cold and dingy, constantly infected with small bits of dirt and dust that had been tracked in from the occassional nurse visit. Not quite the monument to sterile pefection that they had wanted.
The pain in his back throbbed softly with the beat of an electronica drum; Gabriel focused on it whenever he wanted to stop floating in his medicated bubble. He thought about it, his mind reaching out to it like an anchor. He could feel his wings stretching a bit, the muscles having grown enough that he could actually manipulate them. The bones seemed to be fully grown and healing over, and wide webs of leathery skin had develepoed between the wing joints. They had grown a healthy sort of stubble, the kind you get after going for three days without a shave. Pretty soon, they might be growing feathers...but Gabriel didn't know that. All he knew was the dull pain that arced over his back, slowed by the power of modern medicine. And that his bed sheets were dingy.
He retreated back into his haze of white fog, slowly, gradually. The hospital room faded, and so did his bed. The walls, the nurses, the droning doctors telling their patients it would all be OK...all faded, blended together into a simple, pure white.
Gabriel hung there in that expanse. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, or walls...just white space all around him, wrapping his pain-drenched body in a tranquil, open blanket. It was quiet. For a moment, Gabriel almost knew peace; a moment of contentment washed over him like a much needed shower...and then he blinked.
Something red had landed on his torso.
A single drop of some dark red liquid had fallen from somewhere above him. Before he had time to ponder this new development, another one landed somewhere on his chest. This was followed by another, then another. Confused, Gabriel looked up...
There she was, suspended above him, her arms cut up her elbows. They were covered in blood, which dripped down from her slowly spinning frame onto Gabriel. More blood fell from her outstretched fingers, her lifeless eyes staring into him with a decidedly accusatory fixation. Before he could do anything, Gabriel watched her as she floated away, slowly growing smaller, more indistinct...until she was nothing but a red star in a shining white sky. That star multiplied and split into dozens of stars, then hundreds....all of which became the spots on his tiled ceiling.
Gabriel felt a prick on his arm. He looked over quickly, and noticed the nurse giving him another injection. He felt his body relaxing involuntarily before he had time to protest.
He sighed. SilverClaw had not come for days; the last time any friends visited him he was too out of it to really notice. Gabriel silently cursed the wonders of modern medicine as he drifted back into his half-life.
ALEX
Uluru - Tim Wheater
The room was perfect for meditation.
It was cool, and it was calm, and a certain tranquil kind of energy had descended on this place like morning dew. The window to his far left was open, the silky green curtains blowing gently in a soft breeze. It was a welcome respite from the chaos of his life over the past few months.
It was the middle of November, and already this had shaped up to be the worst, weirdest semester of his life. Laura Palmer murdered, then resurrected only to be murdered again...quite a few impostors popping up and attacking randomly...Jack Rutherford 'clones' popping up all over town before descending onto the police station and blowing themselves all to kingdom come...Jack's subsequent conviction of the Palmer murder and disappearance...all culminating in his expulsion from the university. Someone up there hated him. A lot.
Alex was just beginning to form a picture of the events from the past few months. He knew this; that there were more than just people on this planet, that they had all sorts of weird powers, and that his Ethics professor was a satyr. He just shook his head and sighed. Life was a lot simpler when he was just a student.
The room was polished and decadent, complete with cherry wood furniture and green upholstery. The carpet was soft and thick, almost like meadow-grass if you walked on it in bare feet. The bed was equally plush, and so was the high-backed reading chair, and the pillows. It was quite amazing that Dr. Abros was able to afford all of this on a University of Arkansas budget; it never quite occured to him that he might have supplemental income.
The wind blew with a comforting melody from the window, filling the room with a strangely supernatural aura of peace and tranquility. Alex closed his eyes, letting his mind slip away just a bit, into that comforting void of mindlessness...when suddenly, there was a rapping on his window sill.
Alex got up, just a bit grumpily at the interruption. Walking over to the window he spied a large raven perched on the sill. It had a note in its beak, which it let float to the floor at Alex's feet. Picking it up, he wondered what kind of oddness this little note would be the gateway to.
"Watch your back," the note said.
Alex simply shrugged and stuck the note in his pocket. He had gotten used to receiving strangley ominous notes in a variety of strange circumstances. Only time would tell if it would prove correct.
GAME 12: Dreams of Future Past
This was a sort of 'reset game', I guess. My role-playing style was a bit too hard and controlling, and this is the game that I wanted to start turning that around. I got my inspiration from the recent Marvel 'reset' of the X-Men. It picks up where the old series left off, but it takes it into a new, more streamlined direction. It doesn't try to change history; it just selectively disremembers certain things to slough off all the crap that doesn't matter. That's what I aim to do.
I started the game with what I call an 'imagination exercise,' a bit of a meditative exercise designed mainly to help my players get into character. I set music for ambience while I drag the players down into a meditative state, and then take them on a sort of journey through the mind of the character. It was a wild success, actually; I think I'll be incorporating at least semi-regularly in the campaign.
Now, onto the doings.
Gabriel was left drugged in the hospital, while Alex was offered a semi-permanent home by his former Ethics professor, Dr. Benjamin Abros. Alex was just settling into his room when he got the note from the raven, who literally dumped it at his feet and took off. Alex pretty much took it in stride and went exploring into the general library...where he found a quite surprising book.
It was a quite old and tattered book with no jacket. When he opened it and read the title page, his jaw dropped..."The Three Musketeers, First Edition". Underneath was written "To my good friend Eldrin - Alexander Dumas". Before he had much time to ponder the implications of this, though, Kristen decided to show up, looking for Benjamin. They were planning to perform a ritual at Wilson Park, but he hadn't shown up just yet. She elected Alex to come with her instead.
Meanwhile, Dr. Abros had gone to the hospital to 'visit' Gabriel in the hospital, and ended up breaking him out of there. It took quite a few Arts to get him out, but they managed to do it in the end. Gabriel's wings, however, are quite a problem now; they're fully grown, and just beginning to come into feathers. They haven't quite gotten the motor control they need to be hidden effectively, though, so it's quite obvious he has them.
After a minor incursion with the guards there, Dr. Abros and Gabriel managed to make it out of the hospital relatively unscathed. They hooked up with Kristen and Alex shortly there-after, and started off towards the park...this was when Gabriel decided to go back to his apartment.
This is kind of test, I'm sure, of Storyteller flexibility. In that instant, I could see all of my carefully laid plans flying out of the window. Well, the best surprises are the ones you don't know about, so I went along.
Gabriel's roommate Jack wasn't home, but he did manage to learn quite a few things about the outside world that he had missed during his time away. The bike that got totalled during his little run-in with SilverClaw was probably gone forever; once news of Gabriel's 'condition' made the papers and national news, his bike company wrote him a short letter that stated simply "We don't service freaks". Jack's written several notes about how he can never have any sardines when he wants them, and Gabriel found out that chimerical penguins had taken over his bedroom. The best news, however, might have been that Gabriel's 'godmother', Beverly Higgenbotham, was traveling down from his hometown of Wicked to oversee his Fosterage.
As Gabriel was preparing to leave, he heard a knock on the door. Since he's the innocent and trusting sort (and thus easy to screw over...who says a Storyteller can't be sadistic?), he opened up right into the arms of two police officers. He tried to hide his identity at first, but, well...it's not too easy with giant naked wings arcing out from your back.
The policemen were, to say the very least, well-armed. Gabriel was on the verge of being caught when Alex got a very strong premonition that something wasn't right, egged on by Kristen's worries. Benjamin, Alex and Kristen all arrived to engage in a bloody skirmish with cops who were armed with silenced Magnums and tasered night-sticks. After five minutes of the scrappiest fighting ever, the players finally gain the upper hand, and Gabriel ends up shooting one of the officers with his own gun. Benjamin and Kristen quickly calm him down and try to undo the damage. They managed partial healing (Benjamin with Primal Art, and Kristen with Life Magic), but couldn't get answers or finish the job before Fayetteville's finest arrived on the scene.
In quite a hurry, they took the remaining indisposed officer and fled the scene.
CRITIQUE
This was one of the most entertaining games I've ran in a long time. It didn't progress much of the story, but it was compact, scrappy and there was a lot of tension, which is something that's missing from a lot of my games. The players roled their characters extremely well, and I was quite impressed with the thought and instinct that they displayed. They were quite empathetic with their characters; if we can carry the momentum of this game and run with it, pick up one or two more players along the way, then this Chronicle might get up off the ground after all. :)
